Editor & Publisher Magazine Shutting Down After 108 Years

These are not the best of times for print media and they are the worst of times for Editor & Publisher, the journalism trade journal. The Nielsen Co. announced today that it is shutting down Editor & Publisher, which has chronicled the newspaper business for 108 years.

Nielsen is selling eight other trade publications -- including The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard -- to e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by private equity firm Pluribus Capital Management, and Guggenheim Partners, a financial services company.

U.S. News & World Report has effectively abandoned the print news magazine format in favor of producing monthly guides, leaving news coverage to its website.

And according to Jeff Jarvis, who gave the opening keynote at SES Chicago 2009 on Monday of this week, the newspaper industry and trade press have no one to blame but themselves. Web browsers and websites have been around for 15 years, so print media companies had a long time to get ready for the revolution.

According to Jarvis, it's pretty cynical to blame Google and Google News for giving publishers "100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue -- for free."

But it appears that Rupert Murdoch is trying to shift the blame for News Corp's inability to adapt fast enough to the new "link economy" by stirring up what Jarvis calls "Google bigotry."

Sites that aggregate news are NOT "parasites," content kleptomaniacs, vampires, tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet, or "thieves who steal our copyright" no matter what Murdoch says.

About the author

Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR, which provides search engine optimization, public relations, video marketing, and social media marketing services. He's the author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day," a faculty member at Rutgers University and Market Motive, as well as a frequent speaker at SES conferences.

The U.K. Supreme Court has granted permission in part for Google to appeal against a ruling relating to a dispute over the user information through cookies via use of the Apple Safari browser.
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